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In line with the UN sustainability goals and building on the success of the Textile & Leather traceability project, this project proposal seeks to develop a traceability and sustainability framework for critical raw materials (CRM1). This project supports the UN focus on extractive industries and builds on the UN/CEFACT role & capabilities to deliver digital standards for sustainable supply chains.
The purpose of this project is to uplift verifiable critical raw materials supply chain resilience and sustainability through digital standards for data and trust.
Both goals are met through traceability and transparency measures that this project will support through standardization. There are already many supply chain traceability platforms on the market. None will dominate the world’s supply chains and so must improve their interoperability so that supply chains can be traced across multiple independent platforms. This is the primary purpose of this project – namely to focus on the exchange of supply chain information between platforms.
This project will
Critical raw materials are part of our daily lives and paramount to the functioning of our industrial ecosystems (digital, transport, construction, renewable energy technologies, lightweight); for instance, tungsten in phones, lithium in batteries, gallium and indium in LED lamps, rare-earth elements in magnets for digital technologies, electric vehicles and wind generators. Such minerals are “critical” as they represent the most economically important raw minerals with a high supply risk and are concentrated in few geographical areas. Considering cost-benefit aspects and a risk-based approach (for CRMs sourced in conflict-affected states), traceability and transparency tools will be key to support sustainable, resilient and resource-efficient of CRMs. Transparency and traceability would also support addressing unintended consequences, social and environmental sustainability-related issues stemming from heavy metal pollution, resource depletion and habitat destruction.
This project will deliver a suite of materials that support national policy makers, CRM industry actors, and traceability technology providers.
The project deliverables are:
The exit criteria will be
This project builds upon work already completed by UNECE and partner organisations.
Furthermore, there are a number of industry and national groups already working in the CRM space that may participate and contribute. This include but are not limited to :
Participants in the project shall provide resources for their own participation. The existence and functioning of the project shall not require any additional resources from the UNECE secretariat. Note that additional secretariat resources may be required or this project (community engagement, specialist advice, implementation testing) however these additional resources will be funded via contributions from some project member organisations (government & commercial).
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